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7

This should probably be a community wiki
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Marco CeppiAug 23 '10 at 16:39

8

This should probably be on a discussion forum.
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postfuturistAug 23 '10 at 19:36

1

Agree with @postfuturist. This is neither a problem nor an advice request.
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HugoAug 24 '10 at 20:17

@Hugo, could be useful as a reference to which old device is still usable today. (Say, I'm wondering if I can do something with my old 486).
–
Elazar LeibovichAug 26 '10 at 20:38

8 Answers
8

Oldest machine I have running currently (openbsd at the moment) is an old grey dell optiplex I found in a plie of scrap at the University I went to. It's been running as my network router/firewall/wireless bridge/DNS server for three years now.

I have a 400MHz Dell box (K6 CPU, I think) from circa 1999. I've run Slackwares up to about 12.0 on it, but last summer, I put Slackware 3.2 on it, just to see what it felt like with a contemporary Linux.

Very interesting. I had to recompile the kernel (2.0.xx) to get support for a 3c905 ethernet card, and I recompiled XFree86 to get ATI card support. I was able to complie the latests OpenSSH with only a few glitches for remote access.

The oldest machine that I currently have installed is an old HP Pavilion desktop that I picked up from a repossession for $20. It's my main web, DNS, DHCP, NFS, CUPS and SSH server as well as firewall and gateway.

384 MB RAM, less than 80 GB hard drive. Currently running Debian Testing. I once installed AntiX (based on Debian) on it, and it felt far newer than it is, but then I began to miss my GNOME environment.